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Saturday, September 13, 2014

Recess Rhythms

There is an elementary school about a half-mile from my
house in Vieques, and when the school year is in session, I can hear the distant playground sounds of the children.

Ever notice that playground noise sounds the same, whether
the kids are speaking Spanish, English or Swahili?

It brings to mind the sounds of my own childhood in Perth
Amboy, New Jersey, in the Fifties. Especially the rhythms and rhymes of the
girls playing jump rope during recess.

Back in those fifth-grade days, I attended Shull School, a
big, classically designed school set on a hill. On either side of the building
were playgrounds, situated above sidewalk level. There was a
playground for boys and another for girls, just as there were a boys’ entry
door and staircase as well as a similar arrangement for the girls.

Now, each generation of little kids believes they are the
first to think up novel ways to deceive teachers. In my case, I ran with a pack
of little perverts who thought we were the first to notice that all the girls
wore dresses or skirts and if we casually stood on the sidewalk below the
girls’ playground, we could nonchalantly look up as the girls jumped rope --
and treat ourselves to a peek of gam or, if the gods were kind that day, a blur
of underwear.

Skipping rope, for some reason, has always been done almost
exclusively by girls. Maybe because girls are better than boys at displaying
athletic poise while articulating memorized or spontaneous rhyming patterns. It
could be two girls swinging the rope, for example, sometimes swinging two ropes
simultaneously (as in the 1946 photo above), or even two girls in the middle,
skipping in unison.

Over on the boys’ playground, meanwhile, we goonies just ran
around chaotically or engaged in fistfights.

Where did the tradition of skipping rope to the cadences of
rhythmic rhymes come from? I haven’t found any definitive answer. Girls make
them up, it seems, and teach them to one another and to younger girls.

Girls and boys have their own parallel cultures and spread
stories and rhymes and bits of nonsense to one another, passing them down to
younger children and forgetting them as they grow up. There's a whole world of
creativity going on underneath our noses, of which we adults are largely
unaware, despite having participated in it ourselves at one time.

The rhythms we hear during recess do have effect, though, and
affect our point of view.

One folklorist theorizes that some girls’ rhymes hint at
fears of puberty and the consequences of sex – in masked language:

Cinderella,
dressed in yellow,

Climbed
the stairs

To
kiss a fellow.

Kissed
a snake

By
mistake.

How
many doctors

Will
it take?

Some rhymes might be nothing more than a clever way of being
naughty --without rousing the ire of teachers and parents:

Miss
Annie had a steamboat

The
steamboat had a bell

Miss
Annie went to Heaven

The
steamboat went to

Hell-o

Operator

Give
me number nine

If
you disconnect me

I'll
kick your fat

Behind

The
'frigerator

There
was a piece of glass

Mary
sat upon it

And
broke her big fat

As-k

Me
no more questions

I'll
tell you no more lies

Tell
that to your mother

The
day before she dies

One positive aspect of rhyming has been
demonstrated conclusively: familiarity with rhymes is a
strong foundation for reading literacy. Studies confirm that the better children are at
detecting rhymes, the quicker and more successful they will be at learning to
read, despite any differences in class background, general intelligence or
memory ability.

Shouldn’t publishers of children’s books know this kind of
thing? So why did Dr. Seuss – the father of rhymed stories for children --
suffer rejections by 27 publishers before his first book was printed?